Civil Rights - Movements & Figures, Historical Biography - United States - 20th Century, 20th Century American History - Civil Rights, Political Activists & Social Reformers - U.S. Political Biography, Civil Rights - United States, Civil Rights - African

Ella Baker

Name: Ella Baker
Author: Joanne Grant
ISBN: 9780471327172

by Joanne Grant

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Overview

Shining a guiding light on the path to freedom, Ella J. Baker stood at the forefront of the great struggle for civil rights. The battles she fought, the organizations she helped build, the prominent leaders she worked with, shoulder to shoulder - all these make her story a history of the movement itself. In Ella Baker Joanne Grant gives us the first full portrait of the incomparable Ella Baker. Although she shunned the spotlight, believing the glare of the media more a hindrance than a help to her work, Miss Baker, as she was known to all, nonetheless found herself center stage in the struggle for civil rights. Throughout the nineteen forties, fifties, and into the sixties, she fought to desegregate the schools, to increase voter registration, and to encourage participation of African Americans in electoral politics. Above all, she strove to get people everywhere more involved in the decisions that affected their own lives. In addition to her position as a national officer of the NAACP, Baker helped found Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In a political world dominated by men, there were those who did not always know what to make of this driven, feisty, intensely focused woman. Her unceasing efforts brought her into conflict with Martin Luther King Jr. himself.

About the Author, Joanne Grant

JOANNE GRANT began her career in civil rights as assistant to NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois. While working as a reporter for the National Guardian in the 1960s, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and became a close associate of Ella Baker. She produced Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, a documentary film nationally telecast on PBS, and is the editor of Black Protest, a classic documentary history, and Confrontation on Campus. She lives in New York City.

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Editorials

Atlanta Journal Constitution

Ella Baker, one woman worth reading about. The cover photo alone is worth the price of the book. Ella Baker clutches her ballpoint pen, eyeglass case and big purse. She's wearing a blue wool coat, earbobs and Sunday school hat. It's a portrait of a lifelong activist.

Washington Post Book World

Splendid biography . . . A valuable contribution to the growing body of literature on the critical roles of women in civil rights.

Marian Wright Edelman

A warm, tender, and incisive portrait of an unheralded mover in this century's struggle for the rights of African Americans.

Gloria Steinem

The definitive biography of Ella Baker, a force behind the civil rights movement and almost every social justice movement of this century.

David Levering Lewis

Will be received with plaudits for its empathy, insightfulness, and gendered narration of an astonishingly neglected life that was pivotal in the pursuit of American justice and humanity.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This reverential, earnest biography of civil rights pioneer Ella Baker (1903-1986) should give her the wider recognition she deserves. Born in Virginia, raised in North Carolina, a community activist and New York newspaper reporter during the Harlem Renaissance, Baker in 1947 helped organize a series of interracial bus trips to test segregation laws in the South, a remarkable precursor of the bloody Freedom Rides of 1961. She was instrumental in establishing two key organizations: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which grew out of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A mentor to civil rights workers, she supported SNCC's metamorphosis in the mid-1960s into an all-black, militant black power group and, as Grant notes, turned a blind eye to the prevalence of weapons among its zealous recruits. Grant, producer of Fundi, a PBS television documentary about Baker, chronicles her subject's battles for school desegregation; consumer, tenants' and labor causes; her faith in grassroots democracy; and the empowerment of ordinary people. Photos. (Apr.)

Library Journal

Although virtually unknown outside the Civil Rights community, in the 1960s Ella Baker was a feisty, rebellious, and dignified organizer who worked behind the scenes, struggling to make radical changes within the NAACP and other organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She confronted racism during her many travels and male chauvinism from black Southern ministers reluctant to follow the lead of a woman. In this work, which is a bit lackluster, Grant (Black Protest, LJ 6/1/68) does a good job of capturing Baker's spirit, but the book reads more like a history of the Civil Rights Movement and Baker's major role in it, than a portrait of her personal life. We also get a revealing look at some of the key players, e.g., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Rosa Parks. Recommended for students of history and for patrons with a limited knowledge of those radical years.Ann Burns, "Library Journal"